somersault's Journal: OpenPandora open for pre-orders!

The team at OpenPandora have opened up 3000 pre-order slots - better hurry up before they're all gone!

If you've no idea what the Pandora is, it's a handheld gaming console that runs linux, and is powerful enough to handle games like Quake III comfortably. Here are the basic specs:

• ARM® Cortex(TM)-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
         
• 430-MHz TMS320C64x+(TM) DSP Core
         
• PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
         
• 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
         
• Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
         
• Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
         
• Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
         
• 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
         
• Around 10+ Hours battery life

I've placed my pre-order already - I think it's time to dust off the old OpenGL books! :)

Wow

[willyhill]

That's very interesting, thanks for linking to it. Has this been on Slashdot before? I can't say that I've ever heard of it.

Check out the photo [bluwiki.com], that's really tiny!

Re:

[somersault]

Yep I'm pretty sure I heard about it from slashdot and signed up to the witing list from there. There's a better written article on the front page - I haven't been following the development very closely.

I've not done any games programming since before University (wrote a few games for my Amiga, and later I made some pretty good bots for playing against in Counter-Strike, as well as messing about with mods for Quake III etc), but I would love to start a project again. Need to set time aside for it rather tha

Re:

[willyhill]

Well, to be honest I'm not looking at this from the gaming angle. A machine that small running Linux... I can SSH to a server and edit a conf, restart Apache. And maybe listen to some of my jazz MP3s. At that size, if it works, whatever it costs. Frankly all the small form-factor PCs I've seen are either too big to carry around or too underpowered. I looked at the OQO, but it was just too expensive and while I don't mind XP on it (on the contrary), I do need Linux or a *BSD on it to justify the cost, and I

Re:

[somersault]

I doubt you'll be able to get one until mid 2009 then, especially if you are awaiting reviews - been looking into it a bit more, the current batch is going to start shipping at the end of November. They are trying to up the current order from 3000 to 4000 due to the large demand, but they don't know if that will be possible yet.

If you just want SSH you can do that from a Windows mobile phone. I have putty on my HTC slider phone, though if you want a decent sized screen and keyboard, you could have a look at

Re:

[willyhill]

doubt you'll be able to get one until mid 2009 then, especially if you are awaiting reviews - been looking into it a bit more, the current batch is going to start shipping at the end of November.

That's OK though, it gives them time to work out the kinks. I've never been an early adopter of anything :)

If you just want SSH you can do that from a Windows mobile phone.

I tried that with my iPaq, with varying degrees of success. Which means it mostly didn't work...

you could have a look at the Athena.

Never head of